Inside the church kitchen, a man was cleaning up fragments of dishes that had fallen to the floor.

"This is nothing compared to a lot of homes in town," Johnson said.

Brick chimneys, like the one at Ashby's home, had crumbled. Johnson described huge messes inside homes where wall hangings fell and shelves were emptied by the quake.

"There's just a lot of people whose houses are unsafe," Johnson said. "It's really sad."

His church, he added, could accommodate up to 500 people, if needed. Services planned for this Sunday in the chapel, however, had to be canceled because of damage inside that room.

At Johnson's home about 20 miles outside of town, the quake was a rude awakening.

"It really shook," he said. "I think my house is fine. It was really scary."

Johnson said he was amazed to hear that there were no fatalities.

Ashby said the quake that hit Wells was different than the frequent quakes he felt while on a two-year mission in Chile for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Chile, he said, the quakes that came every month or so had more of a rolling motion, whereas the one that hit Wells seemed to shake more violently. Even a quake that Sara Ashby said hit Wells last year was nothing like Thursday's temblor, and she already is planning what to do about her daughters' sleep habits of late.

"You think, 'Don't let them sleep on the floor next time,"' she said about changes that may be taking place around the house. Like switching from glass to plastic, not storing things in high places and getting rid of stuff they don't need, much of which ended up spread out all over the floors of their home.

Through it all the Ashby girls handled themselves well, and their older brother, Nathan, 14, took it all in stride. Nate, as he likes to be called, didn't have much to say, other than he thought the quake was a train derailing a few blocks away.

Naomi Ashby wasn't sure what had happened. "I thought it was a bad dream," she said.

But all she had to do was look at the floor of her bedroom, with clutter way beyond what normally occurs while sharing a room with her sister, to be reminded Thursday that it wasn't a dream at all.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com